Race to develop bird flu vaccine

Page Tools

Blood products and vaccines developer CSL Ltd hopes to have a
vaccine for bird flu ready by August 2006 or earlier in the event
of an emergency.

CSL director of public affairs Rachel David said the company had
been working on the development of a vaccine for bird flu for
several years.

"The federal government has recently given us a grant of $4.93
million for us to accelerate our program such that we are currently
in a clinical (human phase I) trial of a prototype product that
we've already made," she said.

"What we're trying to determine from the trials is the optimum
dose to use and whether or not we need to add an adjuvant (a
chemical that makes the product more potent) to the products."

The results from the current trial should be available in
December this year.

"We're aiming to be completely finished by August 2006," Ms
David said.

"However, we have an emergency dossier which we'll put together
much, much earlier in case we have a problem that arises sooner, so
if worse comes to worst, early next year we will be able to
manufacture product for this circulating (bird flu) strain if we
need to."

Ms David said CSL was using identical technology for an existing
seasonal flu vaccine that the company makes.

A bird flu vaccine could be moved quickly to production once
trials were completed.

CSL would manufacture the vaccine at its facility in Parkville,
Victoria, where it makes its human flu vaccine.

"If the strain that causes a flu pandemic is a strain that we
know about, and the dose (of the vaccine) is what we expect, we can
start getting vaccine out within six weeks and have a complete
order filled by three months," Ms David said.

"So that means we can vaccinate everyone in the country within
three months."

The company would expect to produce 40 million doses of the
vaccine in case it needed to give each person two doses.